Tuesday, May 16, 2017

#130: Pavane, #162: Inverted World

Pavane:
























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"A death was more than an ending; it was like pulling a thread from a richly patterned cloth."
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"This God they prattle on about, where's His justice, where's His compassion? Does it please Him to see dying people hounded in His name, does He snigger at His bumbling priests, is He satisfied when men drop dead chopping stone out for His temples, twisted little God dying tepid-faced on a cross..."
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"It's a terrible thing, being afraid. It's like an illness; like wanting to fall down, and not being able to faint. You see you never get used to it. You live with it and live with it and every day it's worse; and one day it's the worst of all."
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Unless we've decided to label all alternate history stories as science fiction, Pavane (and several other exemplars of alternate history that I have encountered) might be better classified as fantasy, rather than SF. It's a collection of six loosely interconnected short stories, or "Measures" (plus an introduction and a coda) featuring, among other things: vaguely pagan phantasmagoria, medieval-style castles, a months-long siege, starving and miserable peasants, and an over-bearing Roman Catholic Church that has banned electricity and the internal combustion engine. Absent from the narrative are the spaceships or time machines of traditional SF (although there are some veiled allusions to waves in space-time that may in fact just be for atmosphere). Certainly, one could make an argument that if all dystopian fiction is SF, Pavane qualifies, for there are significant dystopian elements. But enough splitting hairs over genre.
Pavane is set in a world in which the Spanish Armada was never defeated and Queen Elizabeth I of England was killed by an assassin. The Protestant Reformation also never happens, and as a result the Catholic Church continues to hold sway over Europe, including England, or "Angle-land". Roberts' anti-Catholic bias is fairly clear here, aside from a brief acknowledgement (I think) of the Church's role in fostering scientific discovery. However, throughout Pavane, it's clear that this discovery is not really shared with the world, for its greater benefit. The Catholic Church of Pavane is domineering and brutal, although with a few good eggs here and there.
The opening two stories set the stage and provide some context about the world we are thrust into. From the start, it was clear to me that Roberts' strength is his terrific descriptive language. The man finds a way to breath life into images that would make any aspiring writer sit up straight and start jotting notes. His style is dark, atmospheric, and evocative, and that is surely not doing it full justice--Roberts' way with words is nearly unparalleled in the SF I've come across in the past decade or so. (Extra points for the fact that Pavane reminded me of His Dark Materials, my favorite fantasy series of all time, for its evocative style, excellent world-building and featuring of an all-powerful Church ruling a steampunk-ish alternate England from afar.)
Measure One is a simple, but effective story that introduces us to the locomotives of the world--a recurring presence in later stories as well. It packs an emotional gut punch for anyone who has ever experienced romantic rejection, and Roberts digs into this relatable brand of psychic pain with sensitivity.
Measure Two introduces us to the semaphores, messaging towers that allow for quick communication in a world where electricity is banned and automobiles are operating at very primitive levels. It's part coming-of-age tale, part world-building, and part Stapledonian phantasmagoria. Again, Roberts' keen sense of imagery and metaphor truly sets this work apart.
Measure Three switches things up a bit--it's a strange, unsettling tale about the Inquisition and rebellion. This one was good in a different way from the first two, but exceedingly dark and much stranger. The title character, Brother John, is one of the more vividly drawn characters in the book, and his transformation left me uneasy and confused. Measure Three has the feel of an ancient epic, not a short story written in the twentieth century. I didn't quite know totally what to make of it, and I think that is sort of the point.
Measures Four and Five represented a rough patch in the book for me. Both stories were melancholy and mysterious, centering on female characters who seem to share several traits, one such trait being that they were largely uninteresting to me. Measure Four helps continue the story of the Strange family, and link them to the Lords of Purbeck at Corfe Gate, as well as add to the mystery of the Fairies who always seem to be at work behind the scenes--but it does little else. There seems to be too much hazy dream sequence material, and often, not enough solid story (particularly dialogue) to latch on to. This description also applies, in spades, to Measure Five, which flitted from hazy description to vague snippet of dialogue in a way that I suppose was meant to be impressionistic, but just ended up being annoying and disconnecting.
Luckily, Measure Six, the best story of the bunch, brings things back into the realm of traditional narrative. It's a masterfully woven story that keeps you turning the pages, with Roberts' trademark mystery and fantastical elements thrown in as spice. Unlike other stories, the heat never becomes too much, though. In Measure Six, we get a dramatic stand-off, some fantastic characters in Sir John and Eleanor (who rival the stoic, strong Jesse Strange from Measure One and Brother John as the stand-out characters of the entire piece), and some deftly executed leaps in time for exposition's sake. The book closes with an ambiguous and not-terribly-necessary Coda, which is a nice little vignette nonetheless.
Pavane is recommended with a few reservations--as far as alternate history goes, I'd rank the phenomenal Bring the Jubilee slightly higher, if only for the slight bumps in the middle as far as Pavane is concerned. If we're talking sheer technical skill and/or descriptive acumen alone, Pavane can stand with the best, not only of SF, but in terms of the broad world of literature that I have thus far encountered.


Inverted World:




















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"When secrecy takes place in the open, as it were, it lays itself open to speculation."
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"We live by our assumptions; if one took for granted that the world we travelled across was like any other, could any education ever prepare one for a total reversal of that assumption?"
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“Whatever else you may think, this place is not the centre of the universe.”

“It is,” he said. “Because if we ever stopped believing that, we would all die.”
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Is a book great if it makes you immediately want to read more by that author? Not necessarily. This was my experience with Inverted World, a well-written, fast-paced nugget of a novel that shined with promise, but at the same time, left me wanting just a little more.
Inverted World tells the tale of Helward Mann, a Guildsman-in-training in the City of Earth. The City is essentially a gigantic wooden building that is being dragged ad infinitum along four massive tracks through often-tough terrain filled with primitive, sometimes hostile, people. Very few City-dwellers  realize that the City is moving, or have any inkling as to the nature of the outside world. They go about their administrative tasks, producing synthetic food, raising children, and reproducing. Only the Guild, who control the laying of the tracks and the defense of the City, seem to know exactly what is going on. We follow Helward as we learn with him just exactly why the City must keep on moving, and what's at stake.
The novel switches between first and third person narration, and in Part I, we get a simply-written, but appealing and straightforward coming-of-age story from the young Mann's perspective. The shift from relative normalcy to the strangeness and disaster of Part II works extremely well; Priest leads us on with intriguing and mysterious tidbits of information as Mann travels "down Past", to the land south of the city, a process all Guildsmen-in-training must undergo. There he learns the terrible truth of the world that the Guild has been hiding from the City-dwellers. But what is really going on? What planet are we on? How did everyone get here?
In the next few parts, Priest introduces more twists and turns, revelations to buffet the unsuspecting Mann who, like us readers, has to deal with all this strange, new information as he navigates his world.
Mann battles outsiders, deals with a precarious romantic situation (the frustratingly independent Victoria), and at times seems like the only truly human character in a swirling, twisting, fractured world of skewed impressions and all manner of unexpected changes. Malchuskin, Mann's gruff but lovable mentor, deserves an honorable mention as another force of simple humanity amongst a tide of strange forces and necessary drudgery.
Like Philip K. Dick's Time Out of Joint, we get a revelation towards the very end of the novel that shifts our perspective once again, and it was here that I had some reservations. The whole thing felt jarring, and perhaps this was Priest's intention. Mann, a character whom any reader cannot help relating to, is left a rather pathetic figure for his lack of knowledge. One feels like a joke has been played on him (although Priest doesn't go in this direction at all), and thus, on the reader. What does it all mean, given this final revelation? Perhaps if Priest had built this final revelation up a little more, it would have resonated with me more. It feels rushed in the moment, and upon further reflection. And what about the clothes that shred from the skins of the three women that Mann travels with in Part II? There doesn't seem to be a satisfying explanation for this, either (for the purpose of remaining spoiler-free, I won't elaborate any more on this point).
Abruptness aside, there are many parts of this novel that work. Priest is clearly a gifted stylist and a deep thinker. There's originality aplenty here, not least in the central idea of the novel--a mobile City with a driving sense of purpose, filled with secrets and misgivings. There's a killer opening line, too, that immediately imparts the reader with the impression that this is not Priest's first SF rodeo.
I very much look forward to reading more Priest because of this, and I expect it shall be soon. While this novel's whimper-not-a-bang ending was not quite my cup-of-tea (and again, I know this was intentional, I just didn't take to it), the way Priest deftly worked his way through impressive world-building and burn-the-midnight-oil mystery has convinced me that my second Priest novel will be very much a worthwhile read.